Imagination Technologies has announced a new mobile GPU designed for small SoCs aimed at the wearable market.

The PowerVR G6020 GPU measures just 2.2mm2 in 28nm, which makes it roughly the size of a single Cortex-A7 core. The company said the miniature GPU is designed for ultra-affordable smartphones and tablets, along with premium wearables, POS devices, automotive trip computers and various electrical appliances.

It is by far the smallest Rogue GPU so far, with a single 4-pipeline core, or one quarter of a standard Rogue cluster. However, the chip can still drive 720p60 displays and it still supports a number of features found in other Rogue designs.

The tiny core can deliver 400-500 Mpixels/second and 12.8-16 FP16 GFLOPS at 400-500 MHz. It supports OpenGL ES 3.0 and can be used on Android, Android Wear, Linux and ROTS hardware.

It can also be implemented with PowerVR video decoding/encoding processors, as well as audio and imaging engines.

The new Imagination Technologies PowerVR GT7900 GPU is designed for Android consoles, but could it end up somewhere else instead?

The company announced the oversized GPU yesterday, with some truly impressive performance claims – the GT7900 trounces the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 GPUs in sheer GFLOPs, and even pulls ahead of Nvidia’s GT 730M.

Meet the PowerVR GT7900, a super-GPU

In fact, the company is so proud of the performance that it described the new product as a “super-GPU” for affordable game consoles, which “turns the dial to 11” (Spinal Tap fans will get it).

Imagination highlighted some figures in its bullish press release:

“It includes 512 ALU cores and delivers up to 800 GFLOPS (FP32) or 1.6 TFLOPS (FP16) graphics and compute performance at 800 MHz (16 nm FinFET+); to give you an idea of how it stacks up versus the competition, a Kepler-based GeForce GT 730M from NVIDIA delivers about 550 GFLOPS (FP32) at a comparable frequency.”

The goal is to bring PC performance and hardware support to Android devices, with OpenGL ES 3.1, new shaders, HDR texture compression and tessellation. Of course, the GPU supports UHD/4K resolutions.

Designed for FinFET

The GT7900 will not show up on any planar process, as it is designed for 14nm and 16nm FinFET manufacturing processes.

Despite its performance, the GPU also features a range of solutions designed to reduce power consumption – after all what’s the point of a SoC iGPU if you’ll need active cooling?

The GPU is just part of a bigger platform for hardware makers, with a quad-core, dual-thread I6400 MIPS CPU, which supports Android 5.0. The platform also features video encode and decode processors, a camera processor, audio controller, radio processor with 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0 support and other components.

Just for consoles?

The real question we have is whether it will end up just in cheap desktop consoles, or a few more products? Chromebooks come to mind, along with portable consoles, or oversized tablets.

There is a problem though – Android consoles never took off.

The hardware is there, we already have relatively powerful GPUs and CPUs in mobile SoCs, capable of running good looking 720p and even 1080p games. However, there isn’t a lot of content out there, so there are very few Android games that can utilize the potential of overkill GPUs like the GT7900, or Nvidia’s Tegra X1 for that matter.

Speedy 2x2 MIMO 802.11ac also offers enough bandwidth for streaming, so additional applications are possible as well. However, at this point the market for Android gaming devices is relatively limited.

The PowerVR GX5300 takes up just 0.55mm2 on a 28nm die, which means it’s as small as a grain of salt. It operates at 250MHz and the company says it can handle everyday tasks with ease.

The GPU features full OpenGL ES 2.0 compatibility PVRTC texture compression technology and of course the emphasis is on ultra-low power consumption. The company is not saying anything about the actual consumption, but the tiny die size sounds very encouraging.

Imagination Technologies says the GX5300 sets the standard for efficient mobile GPUs, making it an ideal choice for entry level smartphones, but more importantly for wearables and IoT gadgets.

Tony King-Smith, EVP marketing, Imagination, said the new GPU demonstrates the company’s leadership in the entry-level market.

“We see many compelling opportunities such as low-cost smartphones and tablets, wearables and IoT devices,” said King-Smith.

Imagination Technologies has announced a new graphics architecture, dubbed Wizard. The first GPUs based on the new architecture are expected in 2015 and beyond. They will pack a few very interesting features and unlock more potential for mobile developers.

Wizard supports better lighting effects, transparencies and ray tracing. This means it can render much more realistic scenes with plenty of reflections and transparent objects, such as glass objects, water and so on. Ray tracing adds another level of realism thanks to accurate ray-traced shadows. Ray tracing and rasterization will be used in unison, bringing more realism without demand too much in the way of hardware resources.

"For the better part of the last eight years, we have been busy developing unique hardware and software technologies to radically lower the cost and dramatically increase the efficiency and performance of ray tracing," Imagination said.

The company believes Wizard will bring a new level of highly photorealistic graphics to mobile devices and other low-power platforms.

However, we are not entirely sure about the use of hybrid ray trace and rasterization. Small developers might not like the idea very much, since it will entail a lot more work. This is especially true of Android's fragmented landscape, but things should be different in the iOS universe, provided Apple keeps using Imagination GPUs which it probably will.

Using a hybrid approach makes perfect sense, as it allows developers to effectively bake textures and thus reduce the load and get the most out of hardware resources, but it also translates into more work. Still, it's better than nothing - a pure ray tracing model simply would not work on today's mobile GPUs, as they simply lack the muscle needed to handle it. It's a step in the right direction, but at the same time it illustrates why mobile graphics still can't come close to what we've had for years in consoles and PCs.

Imagination Technologies has been one of the leading suppliers of mobile GPU solutions for years, but after years of strong growth it now appears that the outfit is about to plateau. Imagination has revised its forecast for shipments of mobile SoCs with its GPUs and the company now expects between 520 and 550 million units will be shipped this year. Originally it was hoping for 580 to 630 million.

Although these are impressive figures, it should be noted that mobile GPU IP doesn't add much to the price of a SoC. In fact, chipmakers often pay as little as ten cents per unit, although high-end designs cost a bit more.

This is indicative of a wider problem for Imagination. Its design wins usually come in the form of high-end gear. For example, it has been supplying Apple with top notch GPUs for years. However, the company doesn't make that much money in the low end space, which is dominated by ARM Mali GPUs and it is attracting players like Qualcomm and Vivante. According to Reuters, Imagination hopes to gain share in that particular segment in the second half of the year.

It will not be easy. ARM's new Mali cores are impressive and ARM can leverage its position to gain plenty of design wins. Vivante has made a lot of progress over the last year or so and it has gained a lot of share. Qualcomm has stepped up its focus on low-end and mid-range SoCs with integrated LTE and Adreno graphics.

The two elephants in the room are Intel and Nvidia. Their market share in the mobile SoC space is tiny at the moment, but this may be about to change. Intel is throwing a lot of money at hardware partners in an effort to secure more sales in the tablet space. Over the next couple of years it might go after the smartphone space as well, especially once it starts integrating LTE.

Nvidia poses a different kind of threat. It is planning to start licensing Maxwell IP for mobile SoCs. While the company's market share in the SoC world is low at the moment, it could become a force to be reckoned with in the mobile GPU IP space.

In some benchmarks Nvidia’s Tegra K1 can push significantly more polygons that Qualcomm’s Adreno 420, but it is still unclear which one will end up faster. Both GPUs are DirectX 11 feature set compatible. Adreno supports Open GL 3.1 that is bringing a tessellation to the mobile world.

Since Tegra K1 has a Kepler core, it comes with full Open GL 4.4 including the tessellation support. Naturally apart from the face demo that looks awesome and very lifelike, we saw a tessellation demo.

We saw some demos of Adreno 420 and we saw that the insect demo pushes up to 270.000 polygons, the number that might impress some. At Nvidia booth we saw Nvidia demo of tessellation on Tegra K1 and this time we saw up to 700.000 polygons rendered when needed. We were told by Nvidia representatives that we can expect some that Tegra K1 can render between 500 and one million polygons a second, which sounds like a lot.

We cannot say whether Adreno guys pushed the 420 to the limit nor do we know which one will end up faster. None of the companies actually revealed real performance numbers that we could measure against the previous generation chips or against each other.

Nvidia and Qualcomm didn’t talk about the shipping date for the devices based on these chips but we hope to see designs in first half of the year from both. Adreno 420 and Tegra K1 will also have to take on Imagination’s PowerVR 6-series parts and new ARM Mali GPUs and the mobile GPU space in 2014 will be quite interesting to watch.

Imagination is the elephant in the room, but adoption of Rogue GPUs has been rather slow over the last few months.

Imagination Technologies, the producer of PowerVR GPUs used in heaps of SoC designs, is still the world’s leading supplier of mobile GPUs, according to Jon Peddie Research. Imagination took the lead when it started providing GPUs for Apple and it never looked back. The new Apple A7 SoC is the first chip to use the company’s new Rogue 6-series GPU and it won’t be the last.

However, Imagination has lost a bit of ground since last year. Its market share in the first half of 2012 was a whopping 52 percent, but a year later it was down to 37.6 percent. Things should improve for Imagination as more Rogue designs appear.

As a result or Imagination’s dip, Qualcomm and ARM muscled in to seize more share over the last year. Qualcomm’s GPU share went up from 29.3 to 32.3 percent, while ARM saw an even bigger gain – going from 13.5 to 18.4 percent in the same period.

Nvidia was the biggest loser. Its share dropped from 4.9 percent to just 1.4 percent over the last year. Since Nvidia doesn’t license its GPUs, the number indicates a steep shipment in Tegra SoCs, which comes as no surprise.

The biggest winner, however, was not ARM or Qualcomm. It was Vivante, which had an 0.3 share last year, but ended the first half of 2013 with a 9.8 share. Vivante IP is used in a growing number of SoCs, but the company doesn’t get much coverage as most of its clients are focused at non-consumerish, embedded markets

Vivante currently provides GPU tech for Marvell, Freescale, Rockchip and Vivante's latest consumer design win we can think of is Google’s Chromecast, which packs a Marvell DE3005 SoC and Vivante GC1000 graphics. You can check out a list of Vivante's design wins here.

What’s in store for the second half of the year and beyond?

We believe Imagination will rebound with Rogue and Nvidia has a chance to make up some lost ground as more T4/T4i designs emerge. However, when Nvidia starts licensing Maxwell IP to other SoC builders, it could gain share overnight. Furthermore, if that triggers a response from AMD we could see the old green-red rivalry extend to the mobile space and who wouldn't want to see that happen? (Imagination, ARM, Qualcomm, Vivante. Ed)

Also, here’s an interesting statistic. The market for SoCs with GPUs grew 81 percent from the first half of 2011.

Nvidia can be a bit strange at times and its decision to license Kepler to mobile application manufacturers definitely falls into this category. Now that the company finally has a competitive GPU on its T4 series SoCs, and when it is getting ready to integrate an even more powerful one in the next generation, it is willing to sell the Kepler GPU architecture to other companies, to its competitors more or less.

Nvidia will also license other intellectual property to the highest bidder, including licenses and IP necessary for GPU design. In other words companies who take up the Kepler offer might be able to come up with custom designs to best meet their needs.

“We'll start by licensing the GPU core based on the NVIDIA Kepler architecture, the world's most advanced, most efficient GPU. Its DX11, OpenGL 4.3, and GPGPU capabilities, along with vastly superior performance and efficiency, create a new class of licensable GPU cores,” he said. “Through our efforts designing Tegra into mobile devices, we've gained valuable experience designing for the smallest power envelopes. As a result, Kepler can operate in a half-watt power envelope, making it scalable from smartphones to supercomputers.”

We must admit that we are rather surprised by the announcement. There is clearly a lot of money to be made in the mobile GPU market, dominated by Imagination Technologies and ARM, so Nvidia is basically choosing to sell its crown jewels to the competition. It is an interesting turn of events to say the least and it might signify the end of the two-horse race in the market. In addition, there is a chance that Samsung or Apple will chose to buy Nvidia’s IP, which could prove very profitable for Jen-Hsun Huang’s outfit.

So what about AMD? It sold Adreno to Qualcomm for pocket change a few years ago, but it might not be out of the running. In a recent interview AMD’s Sasa Marinkovic said although the company sold Adreno it “didn’t forget” how to do mobile graphics. We hope not, and we hope someone at AMD is seriously considering getting back in the game. It would be very interesting to see one of the industry’s longest standing rivalries extend into a whole new market.